Week 3: A Conversation with Guest Speaker Sara Dunaj by Giacomo Enrico
By UCLA X469.21 Student Giacomo Enrico
Giacomo Enrico
During week three, we had the opportunity to meet and speak with Sara Dunaj, social media manager at Princess Cruises. Her discussion covered a range of topics, from native and third-party analytics to working with influencers and handling customer relationship management in the age of social media. She also showed us examples of social media campaigns she has worked on.
Sara Dunaj
Sara began by explaining the importance of establishing clear objectives, focusing on the right target audiences and measuring the relevant KPIs (key performance indicators) to track results. These campaign elements must be established before you can develop effective strategies and tactics.
Objectives may include raising brand/product awareness, driving sales, and increasing word of mouth; sample KPIs are video views, number of impressions, web conversations, revenues, volume of conversation, comments, shares etc.
Sara also stressed the importance of using analytics to refine your strategies and tactics. For example, she described how her team revised its content strategy when the analytic results showed the Princess Cruises audience likes videos more than pictures, and among pictures they prefer images of a ship taken from a certain angle. To wrap up this part of the discussion, Sara gave us an overview of her favorite analytics tools including Adobe Social, Sprinklr, Hootsuite and Sprout Social.
In the second part of our conversation, Sara focused on working with influencers and how to find those who are authentic and embrace the company’s products and culture. Based on her experience, she said such influencers make it is easier to transmit real emotions and share brand strengths and values. She also strongly advised having a very detailed contract whenever working with an influencer in order to avoid potential complications. Finally, she recommended using relevant, easy-to-remember hashtags to create a sense of community and track results of the campaign.
Sara concluded with a few insights and tips for dealing with angry customers. When confronted with a problem, she said it is crucial to write a polite answer that does not come across as a standardized response. If the person still complains, bring the conversation offline.
